UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today named former Mexican Foreign Minister, Patricia Espinosa as the next Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
Espinosa is to succeed Christiana Figueres, a Costa Rican whose tenure ends in July after a six-year term. The outgoing Executive Secretary disclosed in a Tweet this morning that U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had nominated Espinosa to succeed her.
The UNFCCC Secretariat said the appointment needs to be approved by an 11-member U.N. bureau, whose members represent groups of governments worldwide and is now led by French Environment Minister Segolene Royal.
The bureau has no record of challenging nominations by the Secretary-General, diplomats say, even though some had expected that the job would shift from Latin America.
Espinosa, aged 57, works as Mexico’s ambassador to Germany, won high marks for presiding at annual U.N. climate negotiations in Cancun, Mexico, in 2010 when she was foreign minister.
Delegates gave her a standing ovation after she brokered a deal to get negotiations on limiting global warming back on track after the failure of a fractious 2009 summit in Copenhagen.
Those 195-nation talks culminated in December 2015 with a deal at a Paris summit to cut greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2100, shifting to cleaner, renewable energies.
